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Brad picked me up everyday on his way to the office where we seemed to be working in vain, most of the proposals and letters we were sending out, unanswered.
“You’re living next to HER,” he said.
“She’s fine,” I said.
“I can’t imagine living next door to HER.”
“Rooster lived next door to her for three years,” I answered.
“He hung himself from a magnolia tree and his body was ravaged by drugs.” That was what most people believed about the circumstances of Rooster’s death.
But all in all, the work-place seemed to be more pleasant. Cleo greeted us in the morning with a genuine sense of welcome. I began to venture out into the other offices and found Kay, the woman who had worked with a prominent researcher back in the 70s, to be very forthcoming with valuable information concerning hemophilia. It was serendipity doo da. As it turned out, Chapel Hill, North Carolina had been a major center for hemophilia research and treatment for fifty years. And Kay had worked for the King, Dr. Brinkhaus. She hated him. As a Ph.D., she had written several papers about hemophilia, some published and others stolen by other doctors.
“They made me wash the dishes,” she said of her male colleagues.
Kay worked for the King for a couple of years before escaping to Charleston, South Carolina. She finally ditched the male-dominated research field all together to become a free-lance Lutheran minister and a practitioner of bio-feedback in her little office down the hall from Brent’s office in Wilmington. She had been married, no kidding, to a member of Sadam Hussein’s personal staff. The marriage had broken up when he went home to Iraq. I saw her as a grandmother to some corporate women like Cleo who had to become the way they are because a bunch of old guys made her wash dishes, brilliant mind and all. The Jungle had eaten her up. Her next husband, another mideasterner, was also a control freak. She was in continual revolt against all the male domination she had encountered in her life. She was pissed. Menopause ravaged her physically. Her leads were gold. She gave me a list of who was who in hemophilia research. Brent finally woke up to the name of the King, Dr. Brinkhaus and saw Kay in a whole new light.
“The dogs,” he said.
I had read about the dogs and the King, Dr. Brinkhaus, in “Journey,” the book by a somewhat famous family with hemophilia. The story of the dogs was vague to me at that time, but I knew that they had hemophilia and were housed in Chapel Hill. I’m a little bit slow, and the deluge of the material was just that, a deluge. Part of my job was to separate the wheat from the chaff to come up with a good story that would make sense to anyone, let alone make them want to watch it. We had contacted the family who had written the book, but of course they didn’t want to be bothered. The mother was off in Russia helping hemophiliacs, the kid had run for Lieutenant Governor and the old man was writing about royalty. We had also contacted a former Executive Director of the National Hemophilia Foundation. I later learned he had been the Exec during the blood contamination of the eighties. He gave us another good lead. There was a woman who had written a doctoral dissertation about the social history of hemophilia, based on several dozen interviews. Susan Resnick, a Manhattan Goddess, born to a French father and Jewish mother, who reveled in her Jewish heritage, actually returned our phone calls after several weeks of persistence. We sent her money, and she sent us a copy of her BOOK. I was blown away by the insight and readability of the thesis, something academic but still interesting. It surprised the hell out of me.
I had a place to live. I was cooking, for the dog mostly, but things began to improve. On the other hand, I lost touch with Brent over the weekends. In the converging of commitments the woman usually wins, and there was no way Brent was going to let Brenda go because of any work. He was HIV positive, and even though he claimed that it was harmless, he knew it couldn’t improve his marketability to women. I revised and refined everything I knew about the project we were trying to raise money for. And I didn’t know very much. Brent was still the only practicing hemophiliac I knew. The “mild” didn’t infuse himself, and I had been relying on Brent’s point of view. I never did see a mailing list for his newsletter. Up until the time I learned about the Chapel Hill Center I had no reason to believe that he wasn’t the only practicing hemophiliac in the entire state. Chapel Hill had to be a focal point. I was hoping for a gathering of experts.

Saint made her way down from Chicago to check out her new tenant. She was a cannonball of a woman. Cleo had warned me that she would talk my ear off. She mourned Rooster with a stream of complaints about what he had done to her mother’s house, not to mention the damage done to the magnolia tree where they had cut him down (and probably strung him up). The house and the yard were filled with death, yet I felt calm there, especially with Argo’s reassuring smile.
Saint was under the impression that Argo had been adopted by Cleo since she was feeding him, and had been since Rooster had been cut down from the magnolia tree. While Saint was there Cleo didn’t want to keep Argo chained up while pretending ownership. So Argo enjoyed saying hello to the many walkers and joggers and bicyclists that made use of the five mile long paved path around the lake across the street though many thought that they were being attacked by an escaped lion. Meanwhile, Saint grieved to high heaven over the holes that Argo had dug in the yard, cursing Rooster every step of the way. I think she really missed him. The dog loomed as an issue of future contention.
Saint worked in the criminal investigation department of the Chicago Police Department. All I really found out about her job was that part of it was food runs for the detectives. She just shook her head over the circumstances of Rooster’s death.
“This isn’t my section,” she said.
She certainly cared for that house and that property, her parent’s legacy. They had lived there for twenty years, but she wasn’t coming back; she was realistic about the way Southerners treated Yankees, especially single female Yankees shaped like cannonballs. She was all heart, and like many people who had been trashed by emotional involvement, had let herself go physically so that would no longer be a problem.
While Saint worked in the yard, pruning and falling into another hole, Argo would bounce over from the hole he had dug in front of Cleo’s house to say hello, smiling and slobbering. She chased him with the pruning shears.
“I don’t want that damn dog in this yard. Look what he’s done to my father’s lawn.” Saint pointed the shears at me while I mowed around holes. “If Cleo wants him, she can have him. Make him feel unwelcome and he’ll stay away.”
“Sure,” I answered, knowing the feeling. Rooster had been in that house because he was unwelcome in most places outside of it. Saint never moved into the house because she felt unwelcome in the South because she was round. I never felt very welcomed anywhere so I went wherever I pleased. I just never stayed very long unless I found a safe place with some semblance of solitude where I could dig in, yet still get a people fix by going on little adventures. And because of the solitude, an adventure in itself, everything became an adventure, a journey of sorts, with meaning, to me anyway.
As soon as Saint went back home to Chicago, Cleo dragged the dog over by his collar. “Your dog, you feed him,” she said.
“Sure,” I answered.
That was only a part of the problem, because he wouldn’t eat. It turned out that Argo had become used to table scraps. Rooster had been a good cook, Cleo assured me. He had cooked for her quite often. She kept his secret living space a secret. I was eating very little meat. I was eating very little of anything. There was no money. But Rooster had started a fine garden. With money from selling plasma I had begun making trips to the market for pork-neck bones. I cooked them up and mixed the broth with dried food and bones. The dog liked this. I cooked meat for the dog and ate vegetables with rice and pasta. When Cleo saw that I was following her orders she became friendlier.

I finally had the opportunity to remove everything I owned in the world from the back of the truck, minus the cat and the fiddle. Rooster’s old house had been cleaned out of anything of value by vandals and past friends and the distant family that had abandoned him. I heard that the Harley had been hauled off in a trailer. The place was a nice little two bedroom cottage with an old country kitchen where windows wrapped the room. There was also a dog, a big dog, as big as a cow, a dog that could swat a fly with his tail. He was a cow that could leap a fence as high as the moon, a dog that liked to dig huge holes, a dumb dog. A dog Saint Januarius, the owner of the house, wasn’t particularly fond of, but Cleopatra of the Cotton Exchange loved that dog, though she claimed no ownership nor responsibility, a dog called “Argo.”
“I’ll give you a reference if you promise to keep the dog,” Cleo offered. “Saint will never know, she’s lives in Chicago.”
I didn’t have much choice in the matter. I thought maybe she was sentimental over the loss of her neighbor and wanted something around to remember him by. But Cleopatra was a brave new woman, a nouveau corporate moll in a dark blue suit with a scratchy Southern horn for a voice. It was an omen. It was a place to live.
“Sure,” I said.
My belongings didn’t make much of an impression in the house. That was acceptable to me. The clutter had been purged in the last two moves, from Maryland and then again from Florida. Things became easier to let go of after a while, with the simple realization of the transitory nature of things. I had my books, computer and fax machine, futon, a few trunks of video tapes, a roll topped desk, a secretary and a good pullout couch left over from the folks. With a few wall hangings and hooks for pots and pans and a couple of boxes of household items, I was able to elevate myself just slightly above trailer trash. I owned one chair and another was leftover from the Rooster’s things. Fish gave me a small cafe table for the kitchen and an old couch for the second bedroom, and suddenly I had a home a truck a bicycle and a dog.
Without Toots the cat I was willing to give Argo the dog a try, even though I knew that dogs need a lot of attention. It was like inheriting somebody’s teenage son. There was no real connection, yet I had to feed him and put up with his shit. Rooster had never spoken much in the month or so I had seen him around, so I couldn’t really call him friend. On the other hand, I identified with him somewhat, because of my own alienation. Argo had been Rooster’s dog. The big redheaded dog smiled constantly. He had that much in his favor. I certainly couldn’t anymore. I hadn’t been able to afford dental work for years, putting any money earned into artistic endeavors that turned out to be for art’s sake. Yep, I picked all the big money stuff: literacy, tai-chi and then blood. Maybe if the bleeding wasn’t internal and splashed around a bit more, the potential for gobs of money would have been more likely. So I let my teeth go a little bit. The last bonding job I had on the ivories had completely broken down. Between the discoloration and the filing down of the dentist, I had achieved the look of a bone-chomping old wolfhound with that days gone by methamphetamine smile. Oh well, Argo smiled all the time. He just wouldn’t stay in the yard, the great big yard with a fence around half an acre.